How do you help people change their behavior?

I realize that some of the tips in my book might not suit everyone nor every situation. But I think there are a lot of ideas there that would help most people if they just did it. Fogg’s behavior model says that we need three things to change our behavior:

Motivation – we understand the need to change and improve

Ability – we have the time, skills, and resources to change

Trigger – we get reminded to do it. A trigger will only work if we have enough motivation or ability to do it.

This model is the foundation of my new challenge. To make sure people get motivated to try some new things, have the ability to do it, and get reminded when they need it.

I think the only way I can motivate people is to give presentations and write about examples of how I work and how I have seen other people improve their meetings.

To improve your ability, I can try to create tools, presentations, and courses on the subject

The triggers will come from following this blog and some physical artifacts I could create.

These are just some first thoughts on this, but I just wanted to share the background of how I will focus this challenge and what I will do next.

A couple of weeks ago, I sat down with a friend to try out a prototype I have for how to interactively help people plan problem-solving meetings. Only the first part is ready for testing, and I now have to transfer my explanations into text, so they are self-explanatory. I asked him four questions and had him write down the answers on sticky notes:

Problem – What problem do you want to try to solve? Try to summarize it in three points.

Goal – What is the long-term goal? Where do you want to be in a year regarding this problem?

Outputs – What do you hope do gain from this meeting that helps you towards your goal? What are the outputs from this meeting?

Context – What should people know when they enter the meeting? How should they have prepared?

This is your meeting invitation

If the participants have this information when they come to the meeting, then they will be well prepared. They also need the time (Motivation, Ability, Trigger) to do the preparations as well. I got a lot of great feedback, and it also expanded my view on what preparations could be. He was planning a meeting for a management team, and one of the preparations he realized that they needed to do was to talk to their team members about the problem and get their feedback. They needed to check up on some documents as well, but to make this meeting a success the managers had to have a real understanding of what people felt about this problem.

I will expand on this during the week and send out an easy to use tool to help visualize this in a good way.